The present invention relates to image analysis, particularly to ultrasound imaging of hard regions within biological tissue.
It is common to analyze imagery, such as ultrasound, computerized tomography, and photographic imagery, for the presence and location of various features. Typical applications of these so-called computer vision techniques are in the medical, military, and inspection fields.
As mentioned above, medical fields greatly really on imaging for the treatment and diagnosis of medical conditions. One example is in the context of medical ultrasound for prostate cancer treatment using permanent seed implant brachytherapy. Of course, imaging could be utilized in any other field as well and the teachings herein are not limited to the brachytherapy field.
As is well known, brachytherapy involves the precise placement of 50-100 tiny (e.g. 0.8 mm×4.5 mm) titanium “seeds” with a radioactive core. The seeds are placed with the assistance of real-time trans-rectal ultrasound (TRUS) imagery, such as that provided by a B-K Medical ProFocus TRUS. The clinicians also typically rely on computer software to assist in the planning and placement of the seeds. The software can compute the expected or desired radiation at various points in the body as a function of seed location. Clinicians seek, for example, to provide a certain prescribed radiation dose at the prostate while minimizing the dose to surrounding tissue, such as the urethra and rectum.
However, current ultrasound technologies make it difficult for the clinician or the planning software to identify and localize the positions of the seeds within the body for a variety of well-known reasons.
One system that incorporates these image analysis operations is the TRUS itself, as embedded software. Another system incorporating these image analysis operations is a computing device in communication with the TRUS.
Terms such as “stream processor” and “stream kernel” are terms pertaining to the field of computer science, particularly in the context of programming parallel processing systems such as general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs). An example GPGPU is the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX (Santa Clara, Calif.).